Tag: Nabokov

My Reader’s Block, a delightful blog, is sponsoring a rereading challenge for the year 2016. Even though it is late in the year, I aim to the level of “Living in the Past”–rereading 16 or more books. I have a lot of gaps in my reading, but rereading is almost always a soothing anodyne and antidote to those bodice-rippers praised too fulsomely by the New York Times Book Review.

So here I go:

Reread 1: PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov.

I can’t get over the wonderfulness of the squirrels.

There are 13 encounters of various kinds with squirrels in PNIN by Nabokov. Pnin is a Russian emigre who has fled from communism and has ended up as an adjunct professor in the USA. Most people make fun of him as an “elderly” (although he is in his early 50’s) absent minded professor. He is very genial and willing to laugh at himself. But in case you think that the man is a joke, as most of the people around him do, consider the themes of deracination and WWII. Pnin has lost his first love and family members to concentration camps. He is extremely generous and the book is filled with the contrast between the casual joking or cruelty of other people towards the bald man and the reality of his life: one lived with generosity towards others, one of sacrifice and loss, one of kindness to all.

PNIN also is a linguistic tour de force. If you like puns and word play, Nabokov is in top form here. PNIN was written around the same time as Lolita, and he seems to be the anti-Humbert Humbert. In all ways that Humbert is evil, Pnin is kind.

Shh... don't tell anyone I'm poor. They all think I'm living frugal and green just like everyone these days. This is a blog about a senior citizen living a frugal life, on a fixed income, in a low income food desert, and passing along knowledge from lessons learned. Some she learned from her Grandma Mama many years ago and some learned only a few days ago.

Shh... don't tell anyone I'm poor. They all think I'm living frugal and green just like everyone these days. This is a blog about a senior citizen living a frugal life, on a fixed income, in a low income food desert, and passing along knowledge from lessons learned. Some she learned from her Grandma Mama many years ago and some learned only a few days ago.